September - 21st Century Music

From the scholarly perspective, the most valuable essay here
is John Schott’s appreciation of complexity in John Coltrane,
After acknowledging the jazzman’s intensive study of Nicolas
Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Musical Scales and Patterns, Schott
reprints an extraordinary chart purportedly drawn by Coltrane
in 1960 and given to Yusef Lateef, who later reprinted it.
In Schott’s interpretation, "The diagram juxtaposes the two
whole-tone collections five times around the perimeters of a
circle. Lines are drawn connecting each tone to its tritone
across the circle, bisecting the circle 30 times. Every fifth tone
is enclosed is a box to show the circle of fifths. Each member
of the circle of fifths is also enclosed with its upper and lower
neighbors in two ovals," etc. While acknowledging the
metaphysical implications of the diagram’s configuration,
Schott’s theme is that Coltrane wanted to realize within an
improvisatory context the intensity of overlapping
interconnections typical of serial composition.
As always with anthologies of living artists, a skeptical reader
wonders why some people were not included here. I can think
of several others similarly situated whose thoughts I would
like to read. Since Zorn as a performing musician and record
producer not known for catholic enthusiasm, I could imagine a
sequel with a different group of composers, likewise middleaged,
not to mention a third anthology from those a generation
younger.
Arcana also benefits from thoughtful design. For one index,
consider that footnotes are put not at the end of the book or at
the bottom of the book’s page, as is customary, but directly
adjacent to the reference, in indented white-space. Instead of
looking to the bottom of the page or, worse, flipping to the
back of the book, the reader wanting a reference merely
follows his or her eyes across the page. Why is it that this
design innovation for academic crediting should appear in a
book published not by a university press but an art-book
dealer
In several ways, Arcana is richly thoughtful and mostly
readable.
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